What Jason Alexander, buffalo, Rage Against the Machine, and letterpress printing can teach you about creativity, identity, and letting go.
Hey friends! In case you missed it, I started publishing my novella Windsor Greetings two weeks ago here on Substack. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I’d love for you to give it a read after this!
You Ain’t Hamlet
In the video below, Jason Alexander tells one of my favorite standup comedians, Tom Papa, about the time in college his professor shattered his dreams of becoming a serious dramatic actor.
At Alexander’s semester review, his professor brought him into his office and said this:
I know that your heart and soul is Hamlet, and you would be a profound Hamlet. You will never play Hamlet. So you best get good at Falstaff.
See Alexander’s telling of it below at 1:16:33.
Until that point, Alexander had never even considered pursuing a career as a comedic actor. He didn’t even think he was funny, but standing 5 foot 6 inches, 25 pounds overweight, and prematurely bald, he was never going to be cast as a leading man. While plenty of people succeed by ignoring their doubters, that narrative often makes for a better anecdote than it does career advice.
Alexander’s wisdom was in trusting a well intentioned mentor. While the advice was likely brutal to hear, and perhaps even brutal to deliver, it was honest and in Alexander’s best interest. Instead of trudging uphill, against all odds, competing with actors in his age range like Kevin Spacey, Matthew Broderick, Eddie Murphy, and Brad Pitt, he opted to walk a path better suited for him.
As a result, he earned the privilege to portray George Costanza, one of television’s funniest characters of all time, for nine seasons.
Takeaway: Success often demands stubborn persistence, but don’t let it blind you to better opportunities.
Saying “No” for Others
In an interview with Beth Pickens, author of Make Your Art No Matter What, and , author of Steal Like an Artist, Pickens says this (at 8:04):
Don’t say no to yourself on behalf of the entity, person, or institution… Sometimes the answer will be no. Sometimes it will be yes. Sometimes it will be murky or unanswered, and I want you to cultivate a relationship with all those outcomes.
When I first added this quote to my iPhone note to write about later, I only wrote down the “Don’t say no on behalf of others part.” It wasn’t until I played the interview back, that I caught the other, and in my opinion, more profound piece: cultivating a relationship with all possible outcomes.
When you share your creative work, it’s easy to imagine the far ends of the possible outcomes spectrum: your work being heralded by many, or it being mired in controversy. The reality for most, though, especially when you’re just starting out, is that the vast majority of what you produce will be ignored.
This is both a blessing and a curse. It can be frustrating to pour your heart into something and for it to get lost in the void. At the same time, though, developing your voice as a creative is a process that unfolds over time. If you created the equivalent of your earliest work today, I doubt very strongly that it would rise to your own personal standards.
That early phase, where almost no one is listening, is tough, but it isn’t failure. It’s a necessary part of growing creatively. A funny thing happens, though, when you persist through indifference and seek to build community among like-minded creatives. Eventually, your work finds an audience. Whether it’s met with vitriol or accolades, the work itself is at least rooted in a surer sense of self.
Takeaway: Cultivating a relationship with all possible outcomes means finding value in what you do—not in how others react to it, for better or worse.
Killing in the Name
Pre-teen Mike Macfadden was a sight to see: baggy jeans, hemp necklace, Pac Sun T-shirt, and a belt that hung to my knees (for some reason). Like many 12-year-olds, it was an awkward phase, but thankfully one with almost no photographic evidence. Despite a questionable fashion sense, it was during this era that I discovered one of my favorite bands—Rage Against The Machine.
While their politically charged message flew over my head at the time, their driving beats, heavy distortion, and lyrical anger spoke directly to my pre-teen angst. In a YouTube short that found its way to my algorithm, guitarist Tom Morello shared the story behind the riff he came up with to one of their earliest chart-toppers Killing in the Name.
As the story goes, Morello was teaching a guitar lesson demonstrating the sonic effects of playing in “drop D,” when he came up with the riff. In that moment, he paused the lesson, hit record on his tape deck, played then riff again, and then resumed the lesson.
Watch his telling of it below:
I’ve written before about how creative people don’t wait for inspiration to create. Instead, they find inspiration by creating. It’s important to note, though, inspiration does occasionally strike out of nowhere. When that happens, it’s important to be prepared. Morello knew to record the riff for fear of forgetting it later, and because he did, he was able to revisit the idea and flesh it out into one of the band’s best known tunes.
If you’ve never heard it, just a heads up, there’s a lot of cursing at the end.
Takeaway: Don’t rely on inspiration to be creative, but recognize it when it happens. Those moments are fleeting and are prone to vanish as quickly as they arrived.
Buffalo and ChatGPT
There are a lot of AI haters out there these days, and I get it. They’re ethically dubious, prone to hallucinate, and consume insane amounts of energy, but they’re also super helpful. I’m finding myself going to LLMs before Google Search for many of my inquiries.
While I realize their helpfulness doesn’t do anything to address the ethical concerns I just laid, I am a man not without faults. Life is complicated. As such, I tend to compartmentalize such inconvenient truths. So how have I found them helpful lately, and what does this have to do with buffalo?
There’s a linguistic quark of the English language that allows for an entire sentence to be constructed solely of the word Buffalo repeated eight times. It goes:
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
For years, I’ve known that this is a thing that exists but I’ve never understood it. AI tools like ChatGPT allow me to ask just about any dumb question I can imagine, and get a response without judgement. There is something freeing in being able to talk without reserve to intelligent quasi-sentients, and it has allowed me to chase curiosities I might otherwise ignore.
For those who hate on AI, I understand where that sentiment comes from. Used correctly, though, it can be an excellent creative partner. Like a hammer that can be used to smash a finger or build a home, what matters is how you use it.
Oh, and before I forget, that buffalo nonsense? Here’s what ChatGPT had to say:
This sentence is grammatically correct and uses the word "buffalo" in three different ways:
"Buffalo" (proper noun) – the city of Buffalo, New York.
"buffalo" (noun) – the animal, also known as bison.
"buffalo" (verb) – meaning to bully or intimidate.
So the whole sentence roughly means:
Bison from Buffalo that are bullied by other bison from Buffalo, themselves bully bison from Buffalo.Cool.
Takeaway: Sharing your creativity makes you vulnerable to criticism. Surround yourself with those who will root for you—even if they’re made of silicon.
Daniel Letterpress
If you’re not subscribed to Daniel Swartz, do yourself a favor and subscribe now. Swartz is a letterpress printer operating out of rural Indiana. He makes amazing letterform inspired graphics the old-fashioned way—with woodblock letters, paper, ink, and contraptions from an almost bygone era.
He uses words like leading, kerning, and serif, and describes the quality of paper in terms of its tooth. In other words, he’s a typographic badass.
Recently, he was featured on PBS. In the piece, he commented that in his line of work, there is no undo button. Watch the full segment below:
Operating without an undo button requires a level of thought and commitment not found in the digital realm. When I’m typing in a word processor, pushing pixels in Photoshop, or coding a feature in a website, if things don’t go as planned, two keystrokes give me another shot to get it right.
Working in analog doesn’t afford this luxury.
In my most recent guitar build, a semi-hollow, acoustic-styled telecaster build, I misplaced the sound hole by a full half inch. To the OCD side of me, looking at it was like torture, but the measure of a craftsman is not in the absence of errors in his or her work, but in how they recover from the errors they make.
Like Swartz, undo wasn’t an option. I had to find a way to hide my error, and move forward with the project. My solution, plug the hole, cover it with a pick guard, and add a purposefully asymmetrical “f” shaped hole.
The undo button is an amazing tool, I’m glad it exists, but working without one can carry over into the work you do with one. Because of my analog craftsmanship, I try to give more thought to my digital work, execute it more intentionally, and view mistakes as opportunities to explore new solutions.
Takeaway: If you work primarily in the digital realm, you might be surprised by the lessons you learn working in the real world.
Two More Things
Two weeks ago, I started publishing a novella here on Substack. It’s called Windsor Greetings, and you can check it out here. I’d love if you gave the first two chapters a read and then checked back on Tuesday for the next in my serial.
Also, good things are better when shared. If you liked this, it would mean the world to me if you sent it to someone who might like it too.
I’ll see you in your inbox again next week.
Until then,
-Mike